Wikipedia talk:Autoconfirmed Poll

Number of page views in the past 30 days

You need more publicity for something like this to work. --Rschen7754 20:42, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm on it. Kaldari (talk) 20:47, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Legitimacy
If you limit this to only two choices, this poll loses its legitimacy. There needs to be at least three options. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:19, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * The poll is about whether people prefer raising it to 7 or not. How is that illegitimate? Everytime someone has a poll with more than 2 options, it becomes impossible to define what consensus is. Look what happened to the first poll. Kaldari (talk) 22:48, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Is there any evidence to suggest that raising the requirements from 4 days / 0 edits to 4 day / 10 edits had any impact on bad user behavior? --MZMcBride (talk) 14:20, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Why
What possible purpose does this poll serve, aside from possibly riling people up? What in the world prompted the sudden creation of a poll, out of the blue like this? — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 22:28, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * The retirement of Brion Vibber actually. Kaldari (talk) 22:49, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
 * What? — James Kalmar   23:14, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

What are the pros and cons?
It's fine pointing out previous polls and giving their results, but what's really needed here are the pros and cons of the two options. Why should we consider a change? What doesn't work well with the current 4 days, that increasing to 7 days will solve? What problems does increasing to 7 days represent? What's the evidence that backs this up? All of that information may end up being in all of the comments on the poll, and may also be in the previous poll comments, but it should really be summarized somewhere so people without much time can get to the information easily... Mike Peel (talk) 01:03, 9 January 2010 (UTC)


 * hear hear - the pros/cons should be summarised briefly by someone in the know. I have no basis for an opinion at the moment. Rd232 talk 11:19, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

What is the goal?
Is the goal to re-confirm the consensus of a previous poll and have reality match the desires of the editors, regardless of the effectiveness or consequences of going to 7/20? If so, then by all means do it.

Is the goal to stop determined vandals from creating or moving pages or vandalizing semi-protected pages? Nothing short of restricting article creation, moving, or editing semi-protected pages to long-established editors, e.g. several hundred edits spread over 100+ editing-days, will do it, and that might not even do it.

Is the goal to prevent juvenile hijinks? 4/10 already does as well as 30/100 would.

Is the goal to tell brand-new editors editing in good faith "you need a bit more practice before we'll let you create articles, move articles, and edit semi-protected pages," then this is probably a good idea. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  01:07, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Alternative plan - pagecreate userright + limit # of moves/creates by those without this userright
Create a "pagecreate" privilege similar to WP:autoreviewer and limit everyone without it to a small number of article-space page creates and article-space-touching page-moves per day, say, 10, and provide an easy to use procedure similar to WP:AFC and WP:Requested moves so those needing more than their allowance can request moves and page-creations. Administrators would be encouraged to grant this privilege on request to any requesting editor who in the administrator's judgment won't abuse the tool who either has 1) a demonstrated need, e.g. prolific article creator, or 2) several hundred significant/non-minor/non-semi-automated edits to article space spread over several hundred editing-days.

This would give new users a "graduated" level of rights: Their first 4 or 7 days they can't create articles or move them, then they can create a few a day, then when they have enough experience they can ask for that restriction to be lifted. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  01:07, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Alternative plan 2 - flag moves/creates by newbies
Mark moves and article creations by editors who don't have a history of decent editing to make it easier for patrollers to check their work. Something similar to autoreviewer but designed to separate the very new/inexperienced or needs-attention editor from those with a few hundred decent edits and a few decent new articles under their belt. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail)  01:07, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Closing poll
The intent of this poll was to finally get the autoconfirm settings to match the will of the community. It seems that over the last couple years, however, the desire of the community to have a stronger autoconfirm setting has faded. Per, WP:SNOWBALL, I'm going to go ahead and close the poll. Thanks for all the input, everyone. Feel free to continue discussing alternative proposals. Kaldari (talk) 18:05, 9 January 2010 (UTC)
 * That's sort of what I was trying to hint at with a third option. The requirements were originally raised due to the theory that it would reduce the amount of vandalism or prevent the actions of bad users. But what we've seen is that it very little to no effect on disruptive users (they simply make ten edits to their talk page or user page or minor edits to a random article) and it negatively affects legitimate users who simply want to be able to edit one of our hundreds of indefinitely semi-protected articles. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:46, 10 January 2010 (UTC)